Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Mug
Apr 26, 2005
This is the General Game Design, Ideas and Discussion thread: - Use this thread to "Show off your Game-Related stuff (art, code, ACTUAL GAMES, music, whatever), Ask Questions about making games for fun/a living/etc, and anything else related to making games. DO NOT USE THIS THREAD TO START GOON PROJECTS, those threads would do better in YCS"

The FAQ

The White Dragon posted:

you wanna be a one man army, you gotta learn or teach yourself how to do the work of an army. You wanna be an ideas guy, you gotta have the funds to hire that army to do the work for you.
Q: How do I get a job making games?
A: I don't know because I don't have one. Honestly, you probably won't get a job making games until you're a person who actually makes games. Start making games, talk to us about the stuff you're making, pump out whatever you can and enjoy yourself! Maybe one day someone will pay you to do it for them.

Q: So how do I start making games?
A: That's what this thread is about : the starting points. You'll need to be an ideas person, and then just find someone to do all the easy programming work for you and make your idea come alive. Don't worry about art and sound you don't need that poo poo. Really though, you're gonna need to work at it slowly. Ideas aren't too important when you're starting, just make try to make a Pong or Tetris. Pick a development environment (Goon recommendations can go here?) and read a few tutorials on game logic/theory online (See Resources below). You don't need to drop any money on anything to make your first game(s), but you'll need time and some basic math skills.

Q: I just wanna tell people what to do and design games.
A: That's okay, but that's something that really takes a lot of money. You'll be looking at paying wages to a small team of people; namely artists and programmers. I don't think I can really give much advice on being a video game producer.

Q: I'm less interested in programming and more interested in graphics/sound. Can I do this?
A: The "Higher Level" environments like Adobe Flash/whatever let you focus more on being a creative person, and less on arguing with your computer about mathematical outcomes. You can step above the metal and work with an existing game engine like Source and Unreal Engine where you'll be spending more of your time modelling and making maps if you'd like to take that approach (although the SDKs allow you to get down into the depths of the code as far as you're comfortable, too). There's lots of ways to approach this kind of preference, another goon can probably field this perspective a lot better than myself though (I make DOS games...).

Q: Actually, I just wanna do all the programming, can I get someone else to do the pretty stuff and sounds?
A: This is a pretty common position to be in around these parts. If you're fairly happy to throw together tech-demos and prototypes using beeps and boops with MSPainted sprites, but need help getting anything with polish, you'll probably be able to find some help around here. Lots of goons have artists and sound engineers they'll recommend, and you'll need to pay a little money to get someone to hand over original works for your game to use, but it's quite normal to have someone else handling the sights and sounds while you do the programmy stuff. Get busy making your prototypes and pre-alphas and build it in a way that you can drop graphics and sound in-and-out fairly easily, then talk to us about what you're after and (if you're comfortable) show us what you've made. We can usually recommend the right person for the job (goon or otherwise). Our very own goon Rupert Buttermilk is a go-to option for sound design and music in games if you need to get the job done. he even has a thread all about it!

Q: If I make a game, can I sell it and make money? I want to make a living off this.
A: You can certainly try! When you sell a game, you're either doing it "Direct" or via a 3rd party. Direct would usually be a paypal purchase from your own website, and you've probably built a little purchase system yourself. The big 3rd parties are Steam, Desura (I'm not familiar with desura personally), GoG.com, and a few others goons can probably think of. Getting your game onto a 3rd party site will usually take some kind of approval process, and the 3rd party will take a cut of your money. They'll also pay for all your bandwidth needs and take a huge chunk of your marketing worries away. Don't expect your first game to ever be in the top-5 on Steam, but you never know what might happen I guess.

Q: I was thinking about posting my game here but what if someone steals my idea and makes millions and then I am sad?
A: This is the internet, so don't post your idea and expect it to be protected in some way. You can't copyright an "idea" in any sense anyway. If you create something however, it is yours. If you write a story, draw a picture, make a sound, or produce software, that is yours and no one else can claim it as their own (legally). Your "idea" for a game where ten million players can all gently caress hooker bots isn't copywritten and I'm probably gonna steal it and make my own game with hooker bots and get rich from your lovely idea.

If any other questions get asked fifteen times or more, I'll add them to this list.

Resources
https://programarcadegames.com (great tutorial series mnd found on reddit)
https://boards.polycount.net (art)
https://cgtalk.com (art)
https://game-artist.net (art)
https://gamedev.net (programming)
https://gamasutra.com (game development)

Other Threads about Games Gettin' Made
Game Development Megathread | Game Jobs Megathread | Bi-Weekly Game Jam / Goon Games

Get all up in that IRC

There's a gamedevgoon IRC channel, its irc://irc.synirc.org/sagamedev. Get in.

Goons Who Make Games to Some Degree
(Just PM me to add yourself/change poo poo/correct my mistakes and assumptions)
Try to follow your fellow goons on whatever social media sites you share in common with them. Re-tweet/share their (interesting) posts to your followers and help encourage their work to be seen. It's a community thing; get into it!

ambushsabre - Andrew Nissen
Twitter: @ambushsabre
Website: http://setsandsettings.com/

Apple Jax
Website: http://www.icarusproudbottom.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Icarus-Proudbottom-Starship-Captain/414267391979354

Beelzebub - Josh Hass / ZombieMariachis
Website: http://www.zombiemariachis.com/
Website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/omega-shooter/

Bert of the Forest - Nick Lives
Website: http://interactivedeli.webs.com/
Twitter: @slicknicklives


BizarroAzrael - Alexander Maw
Twitter: @xjmaw
Website: http://escapefromthewatertemple.wordpress.com/

blinkeve1826 - Melanie Ehrlich, voiceover actress
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ListenToMelanieVO
Website: http://www.listentomelanie.com

the chaos engine - Folmer Kelly
Twitter: @folmerkelly
Website: http://setsandsettings.com/

Diplomaticus - Dan Rosenthal
Twitter: @swatjester
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/gamepolitics
Website: http://www.gamepolitics.com/

DuFfY - Ben Taylor / Kleaveland
Twitter: @bensgames
Website: http://bensgames.net
Tumblr: http://sunnyjum.tumblr.com

eeenmachine - NimbleBit
Twitter: @eeen and @nimbledave
Website: http://www.nimblebit.com/

floofyscorp
Twitter: @floofyscorp

Freelancepolice - Freelance Police
Twitter: @freelancep

Furret Basket - Fiona B / Stompy Blondie
Twitter: @fionasarah
Website: http://stompyblondie.com/

Hazamuth - Arttu Laurila
Website: https://www.10tons.com/

HelixFox - Kyle Rodgers
Twitter: @kylerodgers
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/helixfoxgames
Website: http://www.helixfox.com/

Hughlander - Doug Warren
g+: https://plus.google.com/111966056249378537062/posts

Jo
Website: http://www.josephcatrambone.com/

Juc66 - Tangental Games Inc.
Twitter: @TangentalGames
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tangental-Games-Inc/104486019670182
Website: http://www.tangentalgames.com

korusan - JT Starr Productions
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JTStarrProductions

Kunzelman
Twitter: @ckunzelman
Website: http://thiscageisworms.com/

LordAndrew:
Twitter: @Lordovos
Website: http://www.lordovos.com/

Lucid Dream:
Twitter: @playsignsoflife
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/playsignsoflife
Website: http://www.playsignsoflife.com/

Nition - Bill Borman / Moment Studio
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bestmomentstudio
Twitter: @nition
Website: http://www.momentstudio.co.nz/

Nuggan - EA Tiburon
Twitter: @JRMendel

Oddx
Twitter: @seemo
Faceboo: https://www.facebook.com/koopmode
Website: http://www.ko-opmode.com

Pfhreak
Twitter: @pfhreak

Pi Mu Rho - Neale Roberts / Dirigible Games
Twitter: @dirigiblegames
Website: http://dreadnaughts.co.uk/
g+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/106180581116801609590/posts

Polo-Rican
Website: http://www.icarusproudbottom.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Icarus-Proudbottom-Starship-Captain/414267391979354

The Radix - Glen Forrester
Twitter: @theradix
Website: http://klikscene.com/

Red Mike - Michael Red
Twitter: @MikeRedhorse
Website: http://codingden.net

RhysD - Rhys Davies
Twitter: @rhysdee
Website: http://www.rhysd.com/

Shalinor - Glass Bottom Games
Twitter: @glassbottommeg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/glassbottomgames
Website: http://www.glassbottomgames.com/

Shindragon - Alejandro Ibarra / Lucasarts
g+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/103466951460959887025/posts

SuckerFreeGames
Website: http://suckerfreegames.com

Svampson - Patrik Riström
Twitter: @svampson
Tumblr: http://svampson.se/

Thumbquat
Twitter: @thumbquat

Toastline
Website: http://colourfire.nfshost.com/

Ol Uncle Anime - Zoe Quinn
Twitter: @ZoeQuinnzel
Website: http://www.beesgo.biz/

Orzo - Eric Wheeler
Twitter: @ericswheeler
Website: http://superobelisk.blogspot.com/

Xibanya - Manuela Malasaña
Twitter: @ManuelaXibanya
Website: http://teamdogpit.com/

Cool Links from narby (from the last thread)

narby posted:

LINK EXPLOSION

Some random links that some might find helpful

Level Design

GeoControl (Heightmap generation software) http://www.cajomi.de/GeoControl/geocontrol.htm
LevelMakers (all games) http://www.levelmakers.com/community/
Interlopers (valve games) http://forum.interlopers.net/viewfo...c78ed1526bccb37
Valve ERC (valve games) http://developer.valvesoftware.com/...ry:Level_Design
Crymod tutorials and dev community (Crytek games) http://www.crymod.com/portal.php
CryEngine video tutorials http://www.youtube.com/user/crymodportal
CryEngine editor and C++ documentation http://doc.crymod.com/
Mapcore (all games + job listings) http://www.mapcore.net
Polycount (all games) http://boards.polycount.net/

Assets

Free textures http://www.cgtextures.com/
Sell/buy premade assets http://www.fallingpixel.com/index.html
Sell/buy premade assets http://www.turbosquid.com/
Concept art discussion/forums http://conceptart.org/forums/index.php

Code

Unity 3D UnityScript Tutorial http://bim.wikispaces.com/file/view/UnityScript_Basics_for_Noobs.pdf[/url]
Free legit Visual studio 2008 express (C++, VB, C# and Webdeveloper) http://www.microsoft.com/express/
C++ beginners tutorials http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial.html
C++ beginners tutorials http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/

Industry

2007 Game industry salary survey http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/416/the_game_industry_salary_survey_2007.php
Map locations for dev/publishing studios http://gameindustrymap.com/map.php
Map locations for dev/publishing studios http://www.gamedevmap.com/
Industry news http://www.gamedev.net/
Industry news http://www.gamasutra.com/
Industry news http://www.gamesindustry.biz/

KRILLIN IN THE NAME posted:

Here's a few links with royalty free sound effect libraries - good starting points if you don't have an audio person.

GDC 2015 - http://www.sonniss.com/sound-effects/free-download-game-audio/ (alt link here)
GDC 2016 - http://www.sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc2016/
GDC 2017 - http://www.sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc2017/

If you're handy with Audacity you can get way more use out of these libraries by layering different sound effects together as well for more unique-ish sounds. There should be another one of these coming out too in a few months time, they've released one every GDC since 2015 so far

Mug fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Apr 17, 2023

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
Goons let me know if there's anything radical to change in the OP, especially the FAQ - It's all from my perspective which is fairly 1-sided. Also let me know if I included your personal website/name inappropriately or incorrectly.

Technologies / Engines / SDKs / Stuff You Might Use To Make A Game
Here's a few words from people who've spent time with different things, hopefully to help you choose the tools you might use to make a game. This list is a bit of an information dump at the moment while I whittle away at the information goons can give me and their experiences. Feel free to contribute information or opinions!

ambushsabre posted:

If you want to program and get started really quickly, you can use Flixel (actionscript 3) to make flash games. If you want to do point-n-click, I reccomend Stencyl (flixel gui edition). I wish this link would get pasted at the top of every page and in the OP: http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/ It's seriously useful for a developer at any level, because it simply lists resources you might not know about. Take a look!

Unity
Unity is a very flexible cross-platform game engine with a really powerful development kit. Anything made in Unity will usually compile to run on Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android. The newest version seems to also play nice with Linux. I haven't personally played with Unity myself, but here's a few words from goons about it.

WMain00 posted:

Unity
Advantages
  • Fairly easy to use.
  • Has a massive amount of support for the implementation of different filetypes.
  • Well known and used within the indie scene means there's a good amount of resources on it.
  • Versatile in what you can make on it (from something really simple to a complex full featured game)
Disadvantages
  • Easy to use, difficult to master.
  • GUI takes a while to get used to.
  • I personally found their tutorials to be rather vague and unhelpful, although it makes up for this by having a good amount of resources elsewhere (including walkthrough guides for making pre-set game ideas.)
  • I also found it rather overwhelming. It feels like you need a dedicated team to do anything on it.


Source SDK
The Source SDK is the freely available software development kit and engine for creating Source games (The Half-Life 2 engine and beyond). You just need a steam account to download it and get started playing. WMain00 had a few words in regards to Hammer, the mapping tool for Source:

WMain00 posted:

Advantages
  • Fairly easy to learn and use.
  • Has an in depth tutorial and wiki and once you get the basic idea it doesn't take long to create the foundations for a map.
  • Has a fairly extensive resource library incorporating all of Source based games.
  • Friendly enough UI that's quick to learn.
Disadvantages
  • Is starting to age compare to other SDK's. Terrain editor is fairly limited and is rarely used for creating anything other than TF2 maps.
  • Absolutely hates leakage and doesn't help much finding it. Got a gap leading into empty space? Hammer won't let you proceed until you fill it.
  • Creating a skybox and background structure can be a fiddly process.
  • Used to crash quite often - particularly if you're doing something complex - although I think that's mostly been resolved.

Game Maker
From what I understand, Game Maker is the new "Click and Play" where you don't really need to get deep into the programmy stuff and can just play around with a simple interface to make your games start working. There's room to get deeper into the coding side of things if you want to, though.

CloseFriend posted:

I used to use Game Maker heavily. If you're willing to get your feet wet with programming, it's capable of a surprising amount in 2D. You can make pretty much anything 2D with enough patience. I know it has particle effects and some very limited 3D capabilities. I haven't used it since I accidentally waited too long for a free upgrade (a bugfix, really) and they said I had to rebuy the whole program just for a bugfix. :argh:

Construct

CloseFriend posted:

Construct has most of the same 2D capabilities as Game Maker. From what I've used of it (not much… yet), it feels more intuitive than Game Maker, but its community is much smaller as it hasn't been around for as long.

ScirraTom posted:

Tom here from Scirra! Just saying thank you for listing Construct 2 :) We're a 2 man company based in London (it's me and my brother running it) and things are going well! We get really excited seeing Construct becoming a bit more recognisable :)

If anyone wants to see some examples of games made in Construct 2 check our arcade. These are my favourites:

http://www.scirra.com/arcade/addicting-rotary-games/848/airscape
http://www.scirra.com/arcade/games/addicting-action-games/1694/my-irrational-fear-of-unicorns
http://www.scirra.com/arcade/games/addicting-action-games/1487/super-ubi-land

Although we have a smaller community, they are all very friendly and helpful!

Panda3D

PyGame (Python): 2D SDL engine

SFML (C/C++/.Net/Python): 2D multimedia API

Irrlicht (C++): 2D/3D engine

Multimedia Fusion 2

RhysD posted:

Advantages

Extremely useful for creating prototypes quickly straight from ideas floating around in your head.
A tonne of plugins that add extra functionality.
Easy to understand for someone with little to no coding knowledge.
Helpful, knowledgeable and friendly community via the Clickteam.com forums.
Exports to Windows, Mac, iOS, XNA, Flash with Android, PSP Vita and HTML5 coming soon.

Disadvantages

No real support for scripting, all event editor based. There is a LUA plugin however.
Although there is support for Hardware Acceleration, it does tend to have a few performance issues from time to time.
Some weird french logic issues.
No real support for 3D. There are a few OpenGL extensions, but they are really hard to use and confusing.

Ren'Py Visual Novel engine.

Mug fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Sep 18, 2012

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

CloseFriend posted:

Would it benefit the OP to list good free/cheap game-maker programs that do most of the programming leg-work for you? Off the top of my head, I can think of Game Maker, Construct, and Unity.

You're drat right it would. I've never used Unity or Game Maker, but I assume Unity is a 3D cross platform game engine with SDK, and Game Maker is light click-and-play, right?

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
Okay, I'm gonna make the 2nd post all about "technologies" with a bit of a writeup on each one for someone who's never used them before and needs to make a decision about whether it's right for them.

Anyone wanna throw some words together about Unity, Multimedia Fusion, Game Maker, Unreal Engine, Source, whatever people use Flash/Actionscript for and anything else?

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
Is Source Film Maker related to making games? I thought it just rendered to video?

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
I've never touched it so I wouldn't know. What's Hammer SDK? Do you mean the Source SDK? I thought Hammer was the map editor for Source. Is that not the case anymore? I haven't played with anything Source before, Hammer was the Half-life 1 map editor I remember.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
What are you using to make that, HelixFox? Is it going to be a kind of actiony run-and-jump RPG?

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
I thought about that while doing my current music license description, but in this design I am only using full tracks from start to end, no loops or anything so it became a non issue. I had to make it clear that I'll be distributing DRM free copies of his music in ogg format within the game folder, so we had to factor that in.

Now we need to talk about Sound effects. I'm keen on having my music dude do the sound too. Should be a beautiful result.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Kunzelman posted:

Just hopping in to say that I have made a game in Construct called Smash the Patriarchy! It is a platformer where you rescue feminist ghosts and platform your way out of oppression.

You can check out my blog post/links here.

I had a great time making the game. I also really, really like Construct (way more that Gamemaker) and I had an awesome time making all the audio and visual parts of the game. I just want to say thanks to everyone who posts in this thread (and the previous one). I've read countless posts about design, read links to forum posts about art, and learned basically everything about game making from this thread.

Anyway, sorry for running in and gushing. I'm just proud to have a finished product, even if it is a little ugly/Mario-like.

Added you to the OP, do you have facebook or twitter you'd like people to follow, too?

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

seiken posted:

Hey cool, thanks for the new thread.

You can add me to this thing if you like, my twitter is @grandseiken but I mostly just follow people and don't use it very much.

Riding the exhilaration of having released an actual complete game my next project is obviously an optimistic roguelike that will take 90 years to make. In celebration of the new thread I wanted to show it off but since roguelikes aren't suited well to videos or screenshots I'll just throw up what I have right now. (If you start in the dark which you should probably restart for until you get an indoor unlit map since it's way cooler, press . to pick up the matches and torch which will be at your feet, W to wield the torch and then l to light it. Pretty much all you can do right now is set things on fire and get attacked by bats which also set you on fire. The rest of the (implemented) commands are listed if you press ?) (If you have any comments about it please say so, I don't know much about UI design)

I picked up a matches and a torch, pressing W was to Wear stuff, though, and it kept saying I can't wear that. I was to Wield, but the wield menu didn't seem to respond to any key presses. After a while i keyboard mashed and my torch caught fire but I don't know how I did it.

Then the bats came.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

seiken posted:

Oh, capital W is different from small w, w is wear, W is wield
Edit: the random maps are the only other feature that aren't completely half-assed right now.

The lighting/line of sight is clearly beautiful.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

The White Dragon posted:

you wanna be a one man army, you gotta learn or teach yourself how to do the work of an army. You wanna be an ideas guy, you gotta have the funds to hire that army to do the work for you.

Gonna work this into the OP in some way because that's a genuine bunch of words.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
loving hell, trying to draw a black border around a not-square window had me loving stumped for ages.

Stupid poo poo like this sometimes adds another 12 hours onto my development time. Now I've gotta make "Close" buttons. Point-and-click menu interfaces are a horrible thing to develop.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Red Mike posted:

Not square as in...trapezoidal or whatever, or just rectangular?

They're rectangular but they have little tabs along the top with various text in them.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
I just sent my music guy a list of songs I want to "Sound like" and a few words of guidance for the original music tracks for my game. I'm really excited to hear what he comes back with.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

ScirraTom posted:

Tom here from Scirra! Just saying thank you for listing Construct 2 :) We're a 2 man company based in London (it's me and my brother running it) and things are going well! We get really excited seeing Construct becoming a bit more recognisable :)

If anyone wants to see some examples of games made in Construct 2 check our arcade. These are my favourites:

http://www.scirra.com/arcade/addicting-rotary-games/848/airscape
http://www.scirra.com/arcade/games/addicting-action-games/1694/my-irrational-fear-of-unicorns
http://www.scirra.com/arcade/games/addicting-action-games/1487/super-ubi-land

Although we have a smaller community, they are all very friendly and helpful!

Thanks for stopping in! I've added your words to the OP. Feel free to add anything else you'd like to say about Contruct to help a new person interested in game development feel comfortable choosing it to make a start with.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
Spritesheet Sunday! (thats a thing now)

Drew these bad-boys and implemented them today. Un/Locking of doors is now an actual in-game ability, not just a function in the level editor.



Drawing a padlock in the isometric perspective took a lot of thinking and failed attempts before I got it looking right.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
tl;dr: This post isn't helpful at all I just wanted to post my story about progamming and jobs.

All my school-aged friends/family are at the point now where they're deciding what to do about their further education; a few of them want to make video games for a living. I don't associate "making games" or "programming" with school at all. I learned to program and basic game design theory from those little cartoony "How to program your MICRO" books by Usborne. I still have them all on my book shelf. I never studied anything to do with computers at school and I didn't go to uni, either.

I'm Australian and I completed my VCE which is "High school"; you do VCE at ages 17 and 18 which is school-year 11 and 12. Your results in VCE work towards determining what you can do in University.

In my VCE, I studied marketing, visual communication (the graphical side of marketing), and a heap of music classes so I could bum around playing bass guitar for my final school years and drawing pictures. Then my exams came around and I ate a bunch of ecstacy, got really average results (on the exams, not the drugs) and decided I didn't wanna to go Uni ever.

I got a job as a tech-support jockey at an internet provider that was going out of business really slowly. Between phone calls, I made a 2D game engine for DOS on my laptop (this was like 2005, not actually the days of DOS). That company went out of business and now I'm a full time software engineer at another Internet provider (mostly PHP stuff) and I'm working on my first actual game.

I don't really know anything about getting a "job" making games, but I know about getting a job doing programming, and I know about programming to make games; I can't imagine doing both at the same time. There's a thread in the OP about Game Industry Jobs where you'd probably get way better info.

Mug fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Sep 17, 2012

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
How do you re-create that hardware "Mouse" feel where its just super responsive in your game engines? I have to draw the mouse cursor as part of my graphics routines when in full-screen because you can't see the windows cursor.

I've got the mouse calculating position rrrright before the wait-for-v-retrace happens then drawing directly to the back-buffer as the last thing it does but it still doesn't feel as real as the windows cursor.

I've tried drawing directly to the video buffer or at other parts of the rendering loop but I just can't get it right.

edit: I think I'm going to implement what I call the "Cannon Fodder mouse", where the mouse is an in-game entity that is affected by camera motion. I hope it's not too disorienting, but it seemed to work fine in cannon fodder; I've just never played anything that used that kind of movement since.

Mug fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Sep 17, 2012

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Shalinor posted:

What's your framerate? Doing a mouse that feels good, without 60fps, is quite hard.

Can you not turn on hardware cursor, though? Not entirely sure what you're building the game in.

I can get hardware cursor straight from Windows when I'm in Windowed mode, but when I hit full screen, I have to handle everything myself. I don't know how to do a hardware call to pull the hardware mouse into my environment.

You can really tell this is the first time I've developed for anything >DOS sometimes. I can't believe how easy it is to use sound now.

edit: I can pull 60fps, but I think the hardware mouse usually polls and updates at like 120hz or more so it just doesn't quite cut it.

Mug fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Sep 17, 2012

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
Maybe 60fps is really just fine and I'm expecting too much. I'm totally rewriting the mouse behaviour at the moment anyway so I'll see how it ends up once it's all re-done.

edit: Hey, about to hit 5000 lines of code. Smashing.

Mug fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Sep 17, 2012

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
I mentioned it earlier in the old thread by I wanted to get some opinions here in the new thread.

If an indie game came out with minimum system requirements of
Core 2 Duo 2.5ghz
2GB RAM
GeForce 8600GT
Would you say that's unreasonable for a 2D game? Would you prefer a drop in video card requirements to Intel Integrated?

mnd posted:

Howdy fellow game makers, etc.,

I came across this earlier today via Reddit (yes, yes, I know) and thought people here might be interested. I haven't taken a deep look at it yet, but at a glance, it looks at least worth such a look, if not more.

Program Arcade Games -- Learn Computer Science

The course uses Python and Pygame, and has a complete YouTube playlist as well.

Check it out!

I've gone and added this to the OP after just a really quick look at it. Looks like a great resource for learning game development theory.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Juc66 posted:

The 8600 is pretty awful and most folks have better cards than that.
trying to support Intel integrated chips will drive you crazy. I'd recommend against it unless they changed a lot in the past year or so. Hardly anyone used Intel chips a while back except for laptop users and now there's much better chips for that stuff now. Both cheaper and faster.

I know things are different now, but I don't wanna alienate the person with a fairly old laptop who is happy to just play little 2D games.

I have a MacBook with a GMA950 in it. I'll boot camp it and do some QA on it.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
My concern is that the game is almost "unplayable (35 fps)" on the following specs, which I consider to still be a fairly okay PC.

Core Due (not Core 2 Duo) 2.0ghz
2GB RAM
GeForce 7900GTX

I consider this to be a pretty powerful machine, but the difference between the Core Duo 2.0 and the Core 2 Duo 2.6 seems to be the big deciding factor. The 7900GTX is way more powerful that then 8600GT, but it has no effect.

I think if you have a decent CPU, the video card really doesn't matter at all and I'll probably be able to target Intel cards.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Orzo posted:

What kind of performance analysis have you done? Surely there is room for optimization if you're having framerate issues. Your game is pretty, but it doesn't look like it should be pushing the hardware that much. What language is it in again?

The engine's got a ton of performance analysis tools in it; in some of my screenshots you can see a little graph in the bottom left of the screen. The game is slowed down by two things, the scaler that zooms everything to 2x all the time is handled by SDL and I can't touch it at all to make it go any faster. The next thing that slows it down is the zBuffer population, which pushes every "movable" entity onto the zbuffer for rendering every frame in order (it doesnt push blocks and walls because they never move). These two things are the biggest performance hitters.

Oddx posted:

Yeah if also depends on if the game is supposed to be super accessible gameplay wise, and if so it should also follow for the hardware too. I have a macbook air that I do most of my iOS dev on with intel integrated graphics and it does pretty okay for that, and I use it for most of my casual gaming.

My target audience probably has the hardware to run the game anyway, but I still feel bad saying "You need a computer made in the past 3 years to play this game that looks like it was made 10 years ago."

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
I'm not too bad at performance analysis. Sometimes I'll dedicated an evening (5 hours) to running through my OptiSlots (which is my performance analysis nodes) and picking one to just work at like crazy to make it lower.

I'm getting there slowly but calculating vision cones and pathfinding are some big hitters.

At the end of the day, maybe you're right and I should just accept that a Core 2 Duo is a reasonable expectation.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
Because my game runs on isometric tiles with a global turn clock, its already got path finding only happening when people bump into a wall/person or when they're told to move to a new location that they can't actually see. All AI only happens when a creatures decision cool-down (related to their footstep speed) hits 0.

I try to make things only happen when needed, and things like vision cones are fairly inaccurate on a per-pixel level because it ends up as huge tiles in the end anyway.

Honestly, it's that 2x screen scaler that's the killer. The framerate jumps to 180fps when you turn it off.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Juc66 posted:

The only things I can think of are to rescale everything once, keep it from memory and use those rescaled items when you need to draw.
OR
use openGL or directX to do the rescaling.

sorry I'm not much help *shrug* that's about all I can come up with.

The "rescale once" is what I considered. My graphics buffers would double in size, but performance would improve MASSIVELY. The game would just require a much larger chunk of RAM, and I think my engine might hit a limit on memory usage if I try to do it. I've hit limits trying other things along the way with map size.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
Do you guys get pissed off if a windowed game captures your mouse pointer? I really like it because it stops you from accidentally clicking outside the window, but I wanna make sure it's not some kind of no-no.

Consider also that Alt-tab gives the mouse back to windows.

edit: holy gently caress I just spent like 4 hours building a relative mouse movement system and it turns out you can just loving do it using the windows API.

Well, that's good I guess, my hand made one was polling pretty slowly.

edit: holy poo poo that works way loving better. That's a huge load off my mind. I was really worried as to how I was gonna make relative mouse movement work with my pathetic poll speed. The windows API just blows all that poo poo away.

Mug fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Sep 18, 2012

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Senso posted:

Personally, when I play a windowed game, I want to be able to click elsewhere - it's usually why I play windowed: I'll have a chat window or work windows, etc.

That's fair enough. I usually hit alt+tab to get out of a windowed game, personally, but I want to know if other people just instinctively expect to be allowed to just move their cursor out of the game window and click outside.

edit: Hey, my program just hit 5,000 lines of code. That's a thing.

Mug fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Sep 18, 2012

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Red Mike posted:

I don't mind it myself, but I've seen people go batshit over anything doing that. Making it an option shouldn't be difficult, I think?

I really need to get some sort of version control set up for my windows development. I used to have git setup with Visual Studio 2010, but the plugin right now seems to not be able to auth with Github any more.

I can't really make it an option because I don't use normal mouse control relative to the window.

If you move your mouse to the very top left of the playing field and then click, the camera slowly pans over to that patch of grass, and your mouse cursor stays upon that patch of grass, meaning the mouse cursor slowly drifts back towards the center of the window.

Because of this, if I let windows take back the mouse cursor, a second flick to the top left of the screen would cause the mouse cursor to fly outside the window way earlier than the user would expect. I tried using SDL's MouseMove to literally move the mouse cursor along the path that the user sees, but that caused the polling speed issues I mentioned before. So I just capture the mouse, lock it to the center of the window and make it invisible but track the mouse movements invisibly and draw a fake cursor on the game window.

I'll just have to get playtester opinions when the time comes.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Bongo Bill posted:

If you've got a cursor while in menus and some other reason for having a mouse at other times, then capture the mouse when you close the menu and release it when you open it.

I'm pretty sure I can do this, so I will.

My game is intended to be ran full-screen, but windowed is an option.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Bongo Bill posted:

As a rule of thumb, make sure it never takes more than a single keystroke to release the mouse even if you do ever capture it. One feature of the Steam overlay is adding this behavior to all compatible games run in windowed (or, if you've got multiple displays, even fullscreen) mode.

Hitting escape will bring up an overlay menu with real, uncaptured mouse that you can move anywhere. Would that be fine?

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
I've spent the last two days working on the camera and mouse so heavily and I'm really starting to get happy with it. I took a lot of cues from Cannon Fodder along the way. I can't think of any other game in the last 19 years that's used that type of mouse/camera movement and I think I've done a really good job of implementing it. Makes it really easy to click on an object even when the camera is moving.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
My game people are only like 17x24 or something to that effect in most cases. You can just copy my proportions if you want a general guide and then make them a little larger given your 50x50 canvas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAn455tLSLU

I can't really draw very well at all, so I usually just google image search the thing I'm looking for, paste it into photoshop and scale it waaaayyy down to the size I need, and then draw over it with my own little bit of style. That's where my plants and watercoolers came from.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Nition posted:

I want to put a small game up for sale on my website, but I'm not sure which system to use. Does anyone here have experience with using the different payment systems?

I'll get the game on Desura if I can, so that's one thing. I already have a Paypal account so I can use that, but I know a few people have had trouble in the past with Paypal freezing accounts etc unfairly. There's FastSpring, there's Google Checkout, I really like the Humble Store system a few indie games have but it seems you can only get that at the moment if you're part of one of the bundles.

Any tips or shared experiences?

I would like to know some info on this one, too. Fastspring looks kinda interesting.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

DeathBySpoon posted:

I guess that's a bad screen- I have 45 and 22.5 degree tiles done in code, but no visuals for them yet. I'll try and get something workable and show how they look. Thanks for the feedback already, I'll look into adding foliage details / etc too.

E:

Slants in place. I'll try adding some brush / foliage / etc now.

E:

Ok, yeah, that makes a huge difference. Not sure what to put on the floor though, if anything. More feedback?

The foliage you have up the top, can you put it down the bottom but make it foreground stuff so your character runs behind it?

Mug
Apr 26, 2005

Nition posted:

I'm thinking of just going with no copy protection, but if anyone has actually used a copy protection system in the past, I'd love to hear what you used and how it worked out. I'm working in Unity. Could probably use anything that's C#-based also.

Don't try to stop people copying your game. You'll never profit from trying to do that in this environment we're in.

Let people go to your site, pay using paypal, send them a special licence key to their email address that they can type in on your site and download your game as many times as they want forever.

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
Literally every attempt you make to stop someone copying your game will have 0 impact on someone who doesn't want to pay for your game, and anything from a "minor inconvenience" to a "extremely pissed off sales impacting" effect on people who would overwise be happy to pay $9.99 for your game.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Mug
Apr 26, 2005
Oh man I just ran the latest build of my engine on Windows 8 and it just locks up as soon as it tries to play the music. Now I'm worried.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply